Anti-Intellectualism & the Literacy Crisis
Intro
With the advancement of technology and social media, however, makes a huge impact by inhibiting young people's ability to think critically. Over the last few years, there has been an outpouring of educators on social media platforms that have time and time again, stated that they are quitting their jobs in droves because of how disruptive and unknowledgeable they are. Libraries are being shut down, and books are being banned throughout the country. The sheer amount of ignorance and misinformation that is being shared and documented in news outlets by our government and politicians just validate the decline of critical thinking. Historically, anti-intellectualism has been used to suppress ideas and manipulate the common people for their designs, which benefits their capitalistic, neo political, and religious agendas. The simple definition of anti-intellectualism is a social attitude that systematically denigrates science-based facts, academic and institutional authorities, and the pursuit of theory and knowledge.
Says Dr. Colleen J. Shogan, a government official and archivist for the U.S., “Anti-intellectualism is the attainment of knowledge through instincts, character, moral sensibilities, and emotions. A person who displays ‘anti-intellectual’ qualities disparages the rational complexities associated with intellectual pursuits. Despite these negative opinions, anti-intellectuals are not necessarily unintelligent or dismissive of smart people. Instead, anti-intellectualism is best categorized as a specific type of anti-elitism. Anti-intellectuals exhibit distaste for the smugness and superiority they believe accompanies intellectual life. For anti-intellectuals, the intellectual generates suspicion and cynicism. Intelligence may be valuable and useful, but intellect is dangerous.”
Exploring the Crisis
The systemic barriers that lower-income communities face, especially students, with the current rise of anti-intellectualism is staggering. Sowing further division and increased polarization, the responsibility of the shift in our culture has much to do with mass media and the rise of AI. Students from the age of kindergarten to high school, even college, cannot read, and are cheating to pass. The education system has perpetuated a cycle of ‘dumbing down’ students, where they are committing a disservice by not holding parents accountable or actually assisting teachers in their endeavors to teach the next generation. This problem only worsened when the population was assigned to stay indoors during the Pandemic. Emily J. Knox writes for the Phi Delta Kappan titled ‘Books, Censorship and Anti-Intellectualism in Schools, “In his analysis of Hofstadter, Daniel Rigney (1991) notes that Anti-intellectualism in American Life discusses three types of anti-intellectualism: anti-rationalism, anti-elitism, and unreflective instrumentalism. The third type is evident in the drive for school reform in the United States, in which STEM and other “practical” subjects are privileged over other types of education.”
Dr. Alfred Tatum writes in his book Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap, “Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate a correlation between low levels of reading achievement and socioeconomic status. Poor students at grades 4, 8, and 12 are underperforming in reading when compared to students who are not poor. This is particularly salient when black males are considered. The reading achievement gaps are wider among adolescents. Many black male high school graduates are reading at the same level as white middle school students or below. Many of these black students attend low-achieving schools staffed with underqualified teachers who are unable to address their students' literacy needs. Also, many of these students' teachers have low expectations about their students' ability to meet high academic standards.” He also credits other books like Masculinity Goes to School, (Gilbert and Gilbert 1998) "the ways in which these needs have been addressed have often been ineffective because they have not taken sufficient amount of the gendered construction of the boys they work with" (p. 200).
The U.S. Education System: 1967 to NOW
In November of 2024, The Atlantic published ‘The Elite College Students Who Cannot Read,’ exposing the literacy and mediacy problem that college students attending these elite schools that feels it is impossible to read multiple books during a semester. Worse, those who make it to college has never been assigned by their teachers in middle or high school to finish an entire book. The concept that students who are attending these elite colleges don’t want to read, but that they don’t know how, which is further exacerbated with the rise of technology and social media, and the decline of media literacy.
Many social media users, whether it be influencers or regular users, expose that they cannot read or have trouble reading an entire book, or you have to condense an entire book into one trope. American students, compared to their foreign counterparts, rank 36th in global literacy Rates, while the National Literary Institute reports that 54% of adults read below a sixth-grade level. Additionally, the National Center for Education Statistics reports a decrease in test scores, but also a widening gap between the high-performing and low-performing students. But while reading does start at home with the responsibility of the parents, and the education system does have its faults as well. The way students have been taught to read has fundamentally changed. The U.S’s education system has changed, as before the 1970s, the use of phonics: matching the sounds of spoken English with individual letters or groups of letters. For example, a word Like ‘bee’, a teacher will take the word, separate the word into its three letters, and pronounce a phone name for each letter in turn, and then blend the phone name into the original word. But then, starting with the 1970s, the system implemented the language approach, with the idea that language is learned similarly to speaking, i.e., children will pick it up naturally if exposed to rich language experiences. The whole language approach focuses on understanding the meaning of the word within sentences and stories, rather than breaking down words into phonetic sounds. This approach seems easy to replicate on paper, but not in school settings. So, the question goes how’d we get here?
Melanie C. & Jeffrey S. Brooks writes in Whole Language or Phonics: Improving Language through General Semantics, “Many educators, policymakers, and parents question the effectiveness of whole language instruction for the acquisition of the more technical aspects of language: spelling, vocabulary, and grammar as isolated events; rather whole language approach teaches these functions of language contextually. Providing an example of a beginning speller working on writing a sentence, Heald-Taylor(1989) observed: ‘I wt s L nt (‘I went swimming last night') took…more then twenty minutes to write because [the student] labored over each sound (went….wu, etc). Eventually, after working through each phoneme, this student was able to express a meaningful statement. Whole language instructors value phonemic awareness, yet they support this awareness by encouraging students to engage texts through reading and or writing rather than through isolated exercises–The ‘writing drafting’ is seen as much more important than the finished product.”
The Rise of Anti-Intellectual Sentiment
The United States has had these attitudes towards ‘intellectuals’ they deem as ‘elitists’. Many prominent figures, corporate leaders, presidents, not excluding Trump, have agreed with this anti-intellectual rhetoric. President Eisenhower, who spoke on intellectuals, quoted, “[They] take more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.” This rhetoric has been passed down in the education system, indoctrinating the framework of a 20th-century factory model by wealthy elites like John D. Rockefeller and Frederick T. Gates, who established the General Education Board of 1902, which shaped the modern American education system, intentionally training students in public schools to develop skills that would make them fit to work in factories.
America’s economy solely depends on people who do not have a high-quality education, because inevitably, they will end up being ‘workers’. The less educated someone is, the more susceptible they are to believing in whatever the propaganda the state is telling them, not question what those in power are stating because they don’t have the critical thinking skills. Eliska Drapalova writes in Corruption and the Criss of Democracy, “The relationship between corruption and democracy is a complex one. However, both concepts are closely intertwined. When democracy deteriorates, we can almost certainly expect an increase in corruption due to the erosion of institutional checks and balances, independence of courts and frequent restrictions of the space for civil society actions and political rights of citizens. Likewise, when corruption is not tackled, new democratic states can hardly consolidate. This is especially true of political corruption that plunders the country’s natural resources and widespread petty corruption that impede the ability for citizens to fully enjoy their new political and social rights. Unresolved or increasing corruption can also undermine citizens’ trust in already established democracies and provoke all sorts of citizens' reactions like abstention and distrust, or contribute to other destabilizing phenomena like voting for anti-establishment parties and the spread of fake news.”
2002 No Child Left Behind
So, we’ve established that lack of literacy skills isn’t an accident, but by design. In 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was signed into law by George Bush. It required annual testing in reading and math for students in grades 3-8 and high school. Schools were held accountable for student performance through Adequate Yearly Progress metrics, and heavy penalties were imposed on schools that failed to meet progress goals. Thomas S. Dee and others writes in The Impact of No Child Left Behind on Students, Teachers, and Schools [with Comments and Discussion] Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2010, pp. 149–207, “NCLB has been extremely controversial from its inception. Critics charge that NCLB has led educators to shift resources away from important but non-tested subjects, such as social studies, art, and music, and focus instruction within mathematics and reading on the relatively narrow set of topics that are most heavily represented on the high-stakes test (Rothstein, Jacobsen, and Wilder 2008, Koretz 2008).”
Louis Harrison-Jones writes in the The Journal of Negro Education, 2007, Vol. 76, No. 3 (Pg. 346) that NCLB requires states to create an accountability system of assessments, graduation rates and other indicators. Schools must make adequate yearly progress (AYP), as determined by the state, by raising the level of achievement of subgroups (i.e., Blacks, Hispanics, low-income students, and special education students) to a proficiency level that is determined by the state. If a single group within a school fails to reach proficiency, the school is considered as having fallen short and additional assistance such as tutoring and supplemental services are provided to students in Title I schools. (Title I schools serve disadvantaged students, at least 50% of whom are in poverty.) Under the provisions of NCLB, schools receiving Title I funds that do not meet AYP requirements for two consecutive years will be identified as "in need of improvement" and parents must be offered the option of sending their child to a different public school in the district. The school must also develop a state-approved school improvement plan. If the school continues to be designated as "in need of improvement," corrective action must be undertaken such as removing personnel, implementing new curriculum, appointing outside experts, reorganizing the school, restructuring the school day or year, and/or replacing existing personnel with new hires.”
2015 Every Student Succeeds Act
Then, NCLB was replaced in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) by Barack Obama, which reduced federal control and gave states more flexibility in education. But both policies focused heavily on standardized test scores, which led many schools to focus more on math and reading test prep, and as a result, subjects like science, history, and the Arts were neglected, limiting students' academic growth, as it didn’t improve critical thinking or deeper literary skills. Because of these policies, most schools focused on preparing the students by giving them shorter passages (excerpts) from books to memorize instead of requiring them to actually read. As a result, we are seeing an education system that seems like it was designed to fail. Public schools in marginalized communities are poorly funded, which causes a large amount of the American public to be either completely uneducated or poorly uneducated. But there is hope to combat this ‘crisis’. Spreading awareness about it, for one thing. Engaging with people on social media and speaking to children and educators about how valuable it is to read. Because finding that one book will change your life.
